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Air Canada is responsible for chatbot's mistake: B.C. tribunal

bc.ctvnews.ca

31–40 of 434 posts

Re: Air Canada is responsible for chatbot's mistake: B.C. tribunal

#31

So a lawsuit vector exists against AI-enabled lack of care for customers. Would be interesting to see if a cottage industry can open up around prompting inaccurate information from company AI info to reap via lawsuits.

You’d have to do so without appearing to intend to do so, and in either case would be fraudulent.

Re: Air Canada is responsible for chatbot's mistake: B.C. tribunal

#32

Yo what was air Canada thinking here... 1 week after the flight, and he even provided the death certificate? How'd anyone let this go to 'court' (I'm not Canadian, it's a tribunal idk what that is) for $600. And I'm guessing it's Canadian so it's more like $400 US. What kind of point were they trying to prove here. I legitimately think you could talk amazon support into giving you that over a broken product.

The civil resolution tribunal is kind of a hybrid small claims court and arbitrator. It was originally started about a decade ago with limited scope over condo/HOA disputes and small claims, but has been expanded.

They have legal authority, but you can always appeal to the provincial courts (which almost never works out, I think they agree with CRT decisions in 95% of cases)

Air Canada baffles me. Their front line employees are powerless and frequently hostile. But I have never submitted a complaint to corporate without being given at least $200 CAD worth of flight credit. Most recently I was yelled at and hung up on by a customer service agent, I got a coupon for 20% off any itinerary with up to 4 passengers. I’m not even a member of their rewards program!

Re: Air Canada is responsible for chatbot's mistake: B.C. tribunal

#33

I wonder whether the bot hallucinated the wrong information or whether the policy changed and the bot simply wasn't updated / retrained. The latter seems more likely but less interesting, akin to information on a boring HTML page getting overlooked during a site update.

The incident was in 2021, so I don’t think it was an LLM.

Re: Air Canada is responsible for chatbot's mistake: B.C. tribunal

#34

Yo what was air Canada thinking here... 1 week after the flight, and he even provided the death certificate? How'd anyone let this go to 'court' (I'm not Canadian, it's a tribunal idk what that is) for $600. And I'm guessing it's Canadian so it's more like $400 US. What kind of point were they trying to prove here. I legitimately think you could talk amazon support into giving you that over a broken product.

> And I’m guessing it’s Canadian so it’s more like $400 US.

FYI, to a Canadian, $600 CAD feels like what $600 USD feels like to an American. Canadian wages aren’t 30% higher in numerical value than US wages.

Re: Air Canada is responsible for chatbot's mistake: B.C. tribunal

#35

I wonder whether the bot hallucinated the wrong information or whether the policy changed and the bot simply wasn't updated / retrained. The latter seems more likely but less interesting, akin to information on a boring HTML page getting overlooked during a site update.

The incident was in 2021, so I don’t think it was an LLM.

No but it would be nice if the same laws would apply to LLMs. Too often they're now deployed as a quick fix for a chatbot.

But before either they quoted me a solution or escalated to support.

Now it makes up a non-working solution.

Re: Air Canada is responsible for chatbot's mistake: B.C. tribunal

#36
I just want to give a shoutout to BC's Civil Resolution Tribunal. They take their job seriously, and make it as easy as possible for plaintiff to submit a complaint.

I once had the misfortune of generating a batch of defective enterprise-grade SSD from a S company. That S company requires all RMA to go through the sales channel you bought the SSD from, but the sales company we used was out of business.

S has refused all attempts to RMA by stonewalling us saying that we need to return the drives thru the bankrupted company. When we explained that the company is bankrupted, S just ignored us. When we created a new RMA request, S's rep says we already have an open case, and that we need to return the drives blah blah blah.

After 5 months, in a fit of rage I typed up a 2000 words complaint, gathered all the emails/phone calls/photo evidences, and submitted a complaint to CRT ($75 fee). I wasn't expecting much, but within 3 weeks I got a call from a corporate lawyer in S company's Toronto office, asked me for the situation, apologized profusely, and asked if I can drop the case if they RMA all affected SSDs.

That day was great, to say the least.

Aside:

The CRT posts all their cases (that reached arbitration) here- https://decisions.civilresolutionbc.ca/crt/en/nav.do

Reading the cases is quite am entertaining time passer.

Re: Air Canada is responsible for chatbot's mistake: B.C. tribunal

#37

Air Canada has always been like this. They were notorious amongst the stranded-abroad community during COVID for selling tickets on flights they weren't operating and had no intention to operate, then refusing to refund, except with credits that also expired before they intended to operate. Scammers from top to bottom.

Were they ever practically compensated in the end?

Re: Air Canada is responsible for chatbot's mistake: B.C. tribunal

#38

I just want to give a shoutout to BC's Civil Resolution Tribunal. They take their job seriously, and make it as easy as possible for plaintiff to submit a complaint. I once had the misfortune of generating a batch of defective enterprise-grade SSD from a S company. That S company requires all RMA to go through the sales channel you bought the SSD from, but the sales company we used was out of business. S has refused…

BC CRT is great when the happy pathway happens. They send legal letters to all parties so they are able to arbitrate, and that letter might be enough to get things resolved.

I had the misfortune of trying to use them for a company which had just stopped responding and in the end even though I did get the default judgment in my favour, actually enforcing the judgment still required me to go through the normal courts (which in my case was not worth the cost). But the process of dealing with CRT was nothing short of delightful.

Re: Air Canada is responsible for chatbot's mistake: B.C. tribunal

#39
Companies should be responsible for the information they give customers, regardless of how they do it.

"Give me a real human" is usually what I say when it seems like I'm talking to a bot. Unfortunately, there have been times when I later discovered that the "bot" was actually a real human that was just acting like a bot!

While AI may seem to be improving, I always keep in mind the possibility that the opposite is also happening; and if you don't want your job replaced by a bot, perhaps you should not be acting like one.

Re: Air Canada is responsible for chatbot's mistake: B.C. tribunal

#40

I just want to give a shoutout to BC's Civil Resolution Tribunal. They take their job seriously, and make it as easy as possible for plaintiff to submit a complaint. I once had the misfortune of generating a batch of defective enterprise-grade SSD from a S company. That S company requires all RMA to go through the sales channel you bought the SSD from, but the sales company we used was out of business. S has refused…

What is a S company?
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